Nerdist Comics Panel #15: Non-Comics Readers

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Ben Blacker and Heath Corson sit down with Blacker’s wife, Julie Lacouture, and actress Jenny Wade (Reaper) to discuss comics from a non-comics-reader’s perspective, barriers to entry, and fandom in general.

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It really isn’t fair to compare Jenny Wade going into her first audition to a person interviewing for a company job. If you equate companies to shows then that would mean you are in a field where you have to go to 5 interviews a day for months and months before you get a job and the companies in your field 90% of the time go out of business within weeks or months meaning you then have to go back to interviewing again 5 times a day. Now if on your second or third job you are lucky enough to land a job at a successful company it might last 3 years before it goes out of business sending you back to months of interviewing. And if your really really lucky and get a job with one of the most successful businesses there have ever been in your industry you might be employed for 8 to 10 years but at no point during that 10 years can you be sure they won’t go out of business.

You can’t expect actors to know about every show they audition for there isn’t enough time in the day. As long as they do the research once they get the role. 95% of actors probably don’t know about the site it series they are joining. And if actors say they are big fans of something it is probably an exaggeration. I do know Sameul L Jackson was a comic book fan before playing Nick Fury because I have heard him talk about them for years in interviews but your crazy if you think any of the other Marvel actors were comic book fans I don’t think they care about comics even now they are working out, acting, posting, and doing things rich people do but they aren’t reading comics or watching movies or TV shows.

As a fan of both baseball and comic books, this episode made me laugh quite a bit. I gotta ask…did the game with the ’75 Marlins take place in the Marvel Universe or the DC Universe? ‘Cause it sure as heck didn’t take place in ours:-)

Wade’s position felt like the evil flipside to what Edidin describes. Someone from the mainstream who is also suspicious of a woman stating she likes geeky things, just because of how this woman looks.

Ben mentioned that they will have another podcast just dedicated to this subject. I look forward to it.

Guys,
I really had high hopes for this podcast, being a comic book writer who writes a book largely meant for girls. I was not crazy about the fact that it turned out to be mostly a point and laugh at girls podcast. Then when your guest started laying out a case against all girls that claim to like comics, it really hit a low point for me.

I’m a pretty dedicated listener to the podcast and I’d love it if you guys could maybe put in the legwork to have a female comics creator on the podcast instead of just taking it from the perspective that go women like comics.

I guess I’m disappointed because I had hoped there would be a bit of conversation about non-comics readers and either getting them in or why aren’t they in. And there were bits of that. But it was mostly drowned out by “Ha ha, you don’t know what a Doctor Strange is!”. It seems to be pretty well the opposite of the message of the Nerdist and he Nerdist Podcast.

Speaking of bazoons (however you should spell it), I hope that we could have in comics some middle ground. That there can be some boobage in comics without scaring female readers.

I love strong female characters, I would love to see more interesting superheroines, especially in comic book movies. But. At the same time there are times when big boobs in comic books just work really great. I believe that every clevagey Emma Frost costume tells a lot about her character. Tigra is wearing only bikini, because she is more animal than human (and if we stay truly to her character she should be naked). Sure, comic book culture is not all civilized yet. For me what DC is doing with recently Harley Quinn is a sexulization of character for sake of sexulization, it changes character for worst. But at the same time I think It’s not an easy judgment to make.

At the same time I do believe that there are „boobagey” comics which are great fun to read. Like „Danger Girl” which is a great Bond-Indiana-Jones-esque parody of adventure genre. A lot unreal boobage, but a great fun.

I’m not saying that boobage is one required part of comics, but I would be against claims that all boobage in comic genre is ugly, unjustified and unnecessary.

So funny hearing about the desperate search for a comic shop on the gulf coast – I grew up in the central gulf coast area of FL and nearly all my comic buying in the 80s was done at the gas station up the road from our house. I often wonder where kids in rural areas even get comics now (if they do at all). Every childhood road trip consisted of me begging my parents to stop at payphones in cities so I could look up comic shops in the yellow pages and maybe we could stop in for a few minutes.